Telephone ordering services currently are available to enable a customer to place a call to a remote vendor and order a particular product or service by code or other description. Whereas systems generally require human operator involvement, recent developments have implemented voice response units that supply pre-programmed messages to the caller in accordance with responses entered through telephone touch-tone key pad or by speech recognition.
Such systems have been applied in so-called pay-per-view wherein video programming is made available to a customer upon request by telephone. See, for example, Foster U.S. Pat. No. 4,897,867 et al. wherein the central office switch collects and processes customer order data from a requesting customer telephone line and supplies a desired selection to be viewed by the customer through a particular cable television channel. Identity of the customer is automatically forwarded over the vendor data link along with customer order.
Other patents of which I am aware that disclose machine implemented telephone line order placement services are Daudelin U.S. Pat. No. 4,943,995 et al.; Caplin U.S. Pat. No. 4,797,913 et al.; Kondziela U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,369; Clock U.S. Pat. No. 4,761,684 et al.; Gordon U.S. Pat. No. 4,763,191 et al.; Barger Jr. U.S. Pat. No. 4,071,698 et al.; Majmudar U.S. Pat. No. 4,897,866 et al.; McCalley U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,849 et al. and Freeman U.S. Pat. No. 4,594,476.
All of the above-noted telephone line interactive systems are disadvantageous in various respects. For example, the system described in the Foster et al. patent requires modification of the central office switch controller to forward customer orders to vendor data links. Further, none of the conventional systems enable the vendor to adequately carry out inventory management, e.g., to query inventory on hand at the vendor site and to report on inventory status, etc. verbally and automatically to the customer. In addition, there is no provision in prior art telephone interactive systems to inform the vendor as to the number of times any selection was reported to the customer as being out of stock.
Data base management by the vendor also is very difficult to carry out in conventional systems, as the amount of memory storage capacity available at the host computer, installed at each vendor site, is limited. Access to the host by the remote customer must be minimized because the host ordinarily will be engaged in processing transactions at the vendor site.